


living like loving like breathing

by seraphcelene



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Not Canon Compliant - The Raven King, Post-Canon, Post-The Raven King, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 08:44:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15882594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/pseuds/seraphcelene
Summary: “Everything in this world requires a heart in trade. There's no such thing as a good bargain.” post-The Raven King AU. Gansey came back wrong. Blue finds her way in the aftermath.****Un-beta'd. I admit that the dispersed nature of fandom these days defeats me.





	living like loving like breathing

_// at the core of this desire is the belief that everything can be perfect //_

The year that Blue Sargent turned seventeen she learned that the human form is nothing like an assemblage of roots and branches. It was an odd thing to learn, completely unrelated to school or college, and not something she had really thought about until Artemus. It wasn't something that she really _understood_ until after she kissed her true love on the side of the road. A tree is not a person. People are not just thoughts and intentions. They are skin and bone, muscle and brain, and some indefinable animating spark. 

A promise is not a guarantee and trading one set of things-to-be for another had always been destined to fail. 

She should have known that.

 

**

 

A ley line is a sanitized thing, penciled lines on a map between asterisk stars and discoverable by helicopter and sonar and science. Complex and irrational, the truth of the thing, the reality of it, is true magic. Corpse road, the whispered suggestion of an unavoidable future, a starburst of the impossible and improbable. Renaming it does not change that fact. 

Distracted and in love with the boys she had claimed for her own, that was the first thing Blue had forgotten that maybe she should have not. 

The second thing Blue did not forget so much as she started to ignore: _If you kiss your true love, he will die._

And because time is a circle, and some destiny's are unavoidable, Blue did, and it happened. 

Gansey's death was quick as a sigh. He gave himself away for Ronan and for Henrietta, and, in a way, for Blue. But remember, a promise is not a guarantee. 

Adam, the scientist, the magician, smarter than them all, told Ronan, “ if you asked – it might die for him.” 

It was like a light tuning on and they all held onto the idea of it. Death didn't _need_ to be permanent. They had all learned that by now.

Ronan asked for Gansey back. But, a person is not a person without a soul. A dream dies with the dreamer even if it's really only sleep. Cabeswater was not just a forest infected by magic. It was something ancient and breathing long before Ronan dragged it from his dreams. Before the trees learned to speak Latin, they learned to read the stars. Before time came loose within its borders, the ground had been soaked with blood and sowed with betrayal.

Cabeswater, the magic that wore it's face, didn't understand what humans were. It didn't understand soul. It knew dreams and stars and unreality. And because Ronan did not dream Gansey, Cabeswater, left to its own devices and because time runs in all directions at once, could not remake Gansey without remaking them all.

And even if for the briefest moment she thought that it would all work out, Blue should have known better. Should have known that she would not get to win in the end. 

 

**

 

_// love is like a garden, love is like a death sentence //_

There had been something about the frantic madness of her days with the boys, the magic in friendship and belonging, that had made her forget. Persephone would have said that the numbers were all wrong. They were five, which was okay, although three was always better. Then Henry Cheng had come along and they were six. No one thought about it, least of all Blue. After all, Persephone had been wrong before. Her body collapsed between the mirrors in the attic had been proof of that.

What came back, the thing that was magic in Gansey's skin, had been only an idea of a boy dreamed by a forest that was, in part, very much a dream itself. He lasted less than a fortnight. 

Not quite two weeks after he was remade, the Gansey that Was-Not-Gansey, with his distant eyes and sluggish heartbeat, disappeared into a tree on the edge of the road that led to the Barns. 

Gwenllian insisted that she could feel Gansey there. “Squatting,” she hissed. Later, her eyes soft with longing, she whispered, “Mother, he is dreaming of the stars.” She stretched her arms over her head and stood on tip toe, reaching for the sky, as well.

Maura placed a hand on her daughter's shoulder and squeezed. “Blue,” she said, and there was the beginning of many things in the gentle croon of her voice: sorrow, consolation, love, and the promise that this too shall pass.

Blue shrugged her mother's hand away. She didn't want to hear any of it.

Calla, her mouth a slash of deepest maroon, sneered, “Figures.”

The curse was accurate, but not specific and once Gansey was dead and returned and lost again, all Blue could think was fuck true love. Fuck destiny. Her heart folded in on itself, the edges withering and curling like a flower.

Blue had never been the center of the story. She can see that now. _They_ were the reality: Noah, Adam, Ronan, and Gansey. This story had always been theirs. Five is a better number than four, although not as strong as three, and when she entered the equation destiny clicked into place. She had been the potential that pushed them all forward.

 

**

 

_// fare thee well_  
my own true love  
farewell for a while // 

The decision isn't exactly a hard one to make. Blue Sargent is too young to live in the margins of her own life ad infinitum. Henrietta is too much sadness and too much loss, and without Gansey it's nowhere that Blue wants to stay. A two hundred dollar plane ticket one-way to Costa Rica and Blue doesn't tell her mother or Calla; doesn't tell the boys. Hasn't spoken to Henry Cheng since the morning she kissed Gansey. For Henry, magic and science collided in a lie that seemed somehow rational, but only on the surface. He wanted so much to believe, but magic in the actual was beyond his comprehension: Adam's lethal hands and roving eyes, rivers of blood and impossible flowers. Venezuela is a bitter memory.

On the day that Blue leaves Henrietta, Maura and Calla are sitting in the reading room when she creeps down the stairs. Despite the early hour, she isn't surprised to find them there, although she had hoped she would not; they are psychic after all.

“Morning, chicken.” Calla's voice is soft and oddly thick, her expression – resolute. “You should learn to dance the tango,” she says. “And how to surf.”

Maura's expression is enigmatic. She sits with her hands pressed palm down on the table. She nods once. “Look both ways before you cross the street.” And because Persephone is not there to say it, Maura adds, “don't take any wooden nickels.” 

Calla takes one of Maura's hands and squeezes.

Blue leans down and presses a kiss onto her mother's curly hair. Maura kisses her daughter on the cheek and gives her two cards: the Page of Cups and Death. Her tense mouth stretches into a shaky, watery smile. Blue can almost see the warnings tucked into the half-hearted curl of her mother's mouth waiting to be spoken. “This is not a forever goodbye,” is what Maura says instead. 

Calla swallows Blue up in a bear hug and gives her a can of mace. As Blue walks away, Maura's voice whispers to her, “I love you.”

**

Blue waits tables and tends bar, harvests crops and cleans bedrooms at four-star resorts. She sends letters to 300 Fox Way with pictures tucked carefully between the sharply creased folds: Blue with her arms spread wide at the top of Macchu Picchu; Blue dancing around a bonfire on a beach; Blue with a beer in one hand, unsmiling. She sends Ronan her picture from high above the trees, a zip line stretching out into the distance. For Adam she snaps a picture of her deeply tanned feet at the edge of a hammock, naked toes pointing out towards the crystalline ocean. She scrawls _Playa Carillo_ across the bottom of the picture in thick black marker. 

Staring at the surf and the sand, Blue thinks of how much Adam would love the ocean – how big and amazing it is. She imagines Ronan chasing him into the water. The two of them, darting and nimble as fish, wrestling and playing at drowning each other. In her imagination, Noah kicks around too, his face lit up and laughing, even though he could never be there. Her mind skids away from the idea of Gansey standing on the sand in board shorts, his contacts traded in for the wire frames. He laughter competing with the roar of the waves.

Homesickness rises sharp and sudden, strong enough to burn away what little contentment she has managed to assemble over the last three years. Suddenly, it's all memories of Ronan and Adam and Noah and Gansey. Memories of her raven boys and of Maura and Calla and Persephone.

 _Sometimes leaving helps_ , Maura had once said. Blue turns her life around in her mind, examines it from many angles. She really can't determine whether or not it has.

 

**

 

_// things that begin and end in grief: … journeys away from home.  
journeys toward home. surgeries. love. weeping //_

Depending on where you begin, this story was never going to have a happy ending.

Summer. Always summer. Always the heat and the dust and the memories like a scabbed over pain. Blue walks the dusty road to the Barns. 300 Fox Way isn't home anymore, not really. Those threads had long since been sawed away and re-threaded with a different definition of home, tied to the intricate embroidery of the lives of her raven boys.

The Barnes are more beautiful than ever. Darker, fantastic and it almost hurt to look at it. Almost as if everything that Ronan had dreamt since that summer had been to make up for the missing piece in the puzzle of their life.

Blue stops at the Oak along the main road first. 

She stands beside the tree that Gansey had picked and stares up into the massive arms of the Oak. She presses her palm to the tree hoping to feel the thread of Gansey humming along the trunk. With her cheek pressed to the bark of the trunk, she calls his name, voice coaxing and soft – as sweet as she can make it. Like Aretmus, he does not respond. 

“Gansey,” she says again, and the tree shivers against her palm. A rustle like a heartbeat, but no answer. “Gansey, please.” 

Stillness, then longing. There is something familiar like mint and coffee and her heart racing, loneliness, companionship, an impression of night and stars and mountain curves. It is Gansey, but not, and the thought makes the loneliness sharpen.

 _Boot camp_ , Blue thinks, sourly. _Just another one who couldn't hack it._ A poor man's copy, if that. A mutation. Not the same thing, at all.

Blue scrubs at the wet on her cheeks, hitches her bag higher on her shoulder and continues up the road. She does not look back.

The door to the main house is unlocked, and the knob turns easily, soundlessly. Blue drops her bag at the door and struggles out of her thick, heavy boots. She wiggles her tired toes, pointing and flexing them as she studies the room. Late afternoon sun streams in through the front window, flooding the room with golden light, soft and diffused. It makes the house feel like a dream and for a moment Blue wonders if it really is. If this is something new that Ronan has brought forth and passed off as reality. Maybe she'll find a dream Gansey in the sitting room with his impossible journal on his knee, still hunting for Glendower. Or maybe she is the dreamer, still asleep in the hammock on the beach in Costa Rica, courting a motherfucker of a sunburn. She could be because this does not feel like reality at all.

“Adam,” Blue calls out, then “Ronan? Opal?” 

There is no answer. The house doesn't feel empty, exactly, but more like it's been waiting. Almost like the sleeping cows in the field or Aurora in the sitting room before they took her to Cabeswater. 

Up the stairs, Blue opens doors along the intricate twist of the improbable hallway in the impossible space of the house's interior. The fourth room that she pushes into smells ripe with green and growing things, the sharp, pungent odor of the sky after a thunderstorm, and just beneath it the slick, sour-sweetness of oil and gasoline. 

“Adam,” she says with a smile.

The boy … the man ... at the window turns. He is familiar, the same watchful blue eyes in a delicately emaciated face. But he is different. Older. The softness of youth sanded away by time and worry. 

“I knew you were coming. Cabes –,” he hesitates, then begins again. “The corpse road … the leyline told me.” His voice is the same, too, all long, lazy Henrietta vowels. “Sorry, Persephone says it's important to call things true. Sometimes, I still struggle with that.”

“Oh,” Blue whispers. She stands there in the room, unsure, her arms at her side aching with the need to hold him, to touch and reclaim. “Persephone,” she asks, confused.

“I see her in my dreams,” Adam says and steps towards her. “Blue.” Her name is gentle in his mouth, the barest hint of a question hanging on the end of it. He touches her hair, tugs at one of the thick coils that has managed to escape the loose knot twisted at the back of her head. “Pretty,” he says. “It's so long, now.”

Blue's quivering mouth curls up into a smile and she laughs a little. “I missed you.”

Adam gathers Blue close, folds her in his arms to rest against his heart. Blue sighs. This is what coming home feels like, the familiar stretch of his body, her forehead pressed into his collarbone. His heart thudding against her ear as he fits his chin over the top of her head. He smells like rain and moonlight.

“Me, too,” Adam says.

 

**

 

_// the song changes. the air changes. the temperature  
of the shower changes. accept this. we must accept this. //_

“Sargent.”

Ronan nods at Blue seated at the scarred kitchen table, her hands wrapped securely around a chipped mug, as if her presence there, in the heart of his kitchen, in his house, is utterly normal. As if she hasn't been gone for three years with nothing but letters and photographs to tether her to Virginia and a past she was running from. They were one sided things, postcards that read _wish you were here_ and _Greetings from sunny_ insert-country-name-here, because she was never in one place long enough to get anything back. 

Adam had said that he knew she was coming. She supposes it makes sense that Ronan would know, as well. Them together, the reality of it something she just barely remembers from the foggy few weeks after Gansey. Adam with his hand in Ronan's, the two of them pressed up close together. She tries to see the shape of them: fierce, angry, sharp-edged Ronan and Adam, calculating and elegant and _wanting_.

Blue doesn't say anything to Ronan. Takes him in with her eyes, all the ways that he's changed and grown older. Three years is not a long time, except that it is when tragedy is the thing that has kept you apart. Like Adam, the youth has been washed from Ronan's face. Unlike Adam, Ronan was always more sharp edges than anything else. He is bigger now, more muscle, and he takes up more space. Not just physical space, it's something in the way the air changes when he walks into the room.

Ronan pauses beside the sink, his mouth for Adam. One hand disappears into the pan of soapy water. There is the dull thump of a dish released and landing on the plastic bottom. Ronan's other grimy hand rests against Adam's waist, curled and fisted in the green t-shirt. He stands flush against Adam's side. 

Blue wonders if Ronan even registered the way Adam had reached for the kiss even with his hands slick with soap and buried beneath dirty dishes. 

Finally, Ronan turns and brushes a hand across the crown of Blue's hair. “Good to see you, maggot,” he mutters, his voice rough and ghosted with affection.

Blue stares into the mug between her hands, the girl reflected back up at her smiles in return. “You, too, asshole.”

**

Blue wasn't planning to stay long, but she wasn't planning on leaving anytime soon, either. She takes over Declan's old room. Spends hours curled up on the edge of the big bed and staring out the window that overlooks the valley until her eyes begin to cross and the sunset smear into an expressionist painting.

The days bleed one into the next and Blue haunts the house. She folds herself into the nooks and crannies of the Barns, quiet and still for the first time in her life. Nothing that needs to be done, nowhere she wants to be, holding her breath. Some days Blue curls beneath the oak tree closest to the house. The Gansey Tree, Opal calls it.

Opal presses her ear to the tree's trunk and declares, “There's a heart. I can hear it.” 

Blue huffs, an expulsion of sound and air that is all frustration and some disbelief. She throws a rock at the tree. 

“Skin's thick,” Opal says and turns away, the tree much less interesting than it had been. She wanders towards the back fields, towards the tiny patch of dreaming Ronan had made just for her.

Blue throws another rock at the tree. “Goddamn you, Richard Gansey the Fucking Third. It's not fair.” Blue jumps to her feet and throws another rock, harder this time, and then another and another. Aims for the knot like an eye high up in the center of the trunk. “You don't get to just die,” she cries. “You don't get to just leave us here.” 

Three years and everything she's wanted to say in the shell-shocked months after finding Glendower bubble up and spill over. She punctuates her tirade with rocks flung at the tree, bouncing back to litter the ground at her feet.

An acorn falls from the tree and taps her on the head, the thump almost an affectionate rap like Ronan's hand across the top of her head. Blue stops, gaze dropping to the remaining rocks folded into her fists. She drops them. “I loved you,” she says, her voice breaking.

A shower of leaves flutter down onto Blue, catching in her hair and the wide, loose weave of her sweater. Whether it's the wind or Gansey, she can't tell. 

 

**

 

_//this is how you make the meaning, you take two things  
and try to define the space between them //_

The first night that Adam comes to the door is less than two weeks after Blue's moved in.

She's cried herself into hiccups and he brings her a glass of water. Makes her sit up and drink it, one hand massaging slow circles on her back to help her calm. Blue leans into him, tucked close beneath his arms, her legs across his lap. Adam holds her, cheek resting against her head.

“I miss him, too,” Adam says. “Even now. Still.” And that makes her cry all the harder.

Loving Gansey was the thing that brought them all together. He pulled them like satellites into his orbit and now that he's gone, they're wildly off-course, unsure and floundering. Five who became four than two plus one. 

Sitting on the edge of Declan's bed, half in Adam's lap, face warm and raw with tears, Blue feels for a moment the unraveling of time. It's a strange, dreamy feeling, a circular recurrence of now and once-at-some-point, molasses slow and drawn out. Time like a circle, the past and the present running into each other so that Blue remembers this and also feels it like it's the first time. 

This is not the summer after they first met. They are not in his room above St. Agnes, sticky with sweat and electric with wanting, cuddled close, bodies straining against each other. His chin on her head, hand on her cheek, her fingers carefully mapping the length of his spine. This is not then and it is familiar. It is now and they have lived a whole other life since the last time they saw each other. Blue has climbed mountains, Adam has given himself up to the corpse road, and fallen into Ronan Lynch.

Later, Blue isn't sure who moved first. If she tilted her head up or if he looked down. She doesn't recall the moment when comfort became something else entirely. Only that there was a moment when she wanted nothing more than to climb out of her skin and into his. To disappear from the ache of losing everything that she had ever wanted. The puff of his breath against her lips made her pause - habit or resistance. Could a body have more than one true love? Would she kill them all?

“It's okay,” Adam whispers against her lips because of course it is. Blue Sargent is not his true love.

Adam kisses Blue because they are more than friends and more than family. Their hurt is the same. His mouth is soft and moist and sweet. His tongue against the seam of her lips, a question. The easy part of Blue's mouth beneath Adam's, an answer. Then it is all a memory of something that had never happened except with other people.

Blue presses into the kiss, her tongue tangling with his. She twists in his lap, restless against the firm bulge of his erection against her hip. Adam's hands pull apart the loose knot of her hair.

“All these beautiful curls,” Adam laughs. “I never would have guessed.”

“Pain in my ass.” Blue smiles in return.

“Gans ...” Adam doesn't finish the thought. Doesn't say how much Gansey would have loved these luscious, loopy, inky black curls. Blue's smile fades, her eyes glazed by sudden tears.

Adam brushes her cheekbone with his thumb, collecting the moisture there. He kisses her again, desperate, hard, working at her mouth with his as if he can eat her sadness away. Blue lets him. Tries to do the same. Tries to drown out the echo of Gansey in their minds.

His hands are peeling away her shirt, the callouses on his palms scratching against her pearled nipples and she arches into the touch. A whimper breaks from her throat when he slides his hand down into the shadows between her thighs. Her legs part and Blue shifts, re-settling herself to straddle Adam's lap. His cock is thick and hard, solid and curving between her legs. She grinds her body against him, reaching for the snap at the top of his jeans. Adam's hand strokes steadily between her thighs, shoving her panties to the side and rubbing against her clit until her body buckles and she shudders. It's a small climax, a tiny earthquake that only makes her want more. Want _him_ , want to feel something in this place that is not melancholy or heartbreak.

“Adam.” She says his name like it's the answer to everything. 

Adam leans up and nips at her bottom lip, his mouth following the curve of her throat to bite down gently in the tender join of neck and shoulder. 

Neither of them hear the bedroom door open or close, bare feet on the wooden floor. There is only the sudden fist in Blue's hair, tugging her head back gently. Her eyes snap open and Ronan's ferocious eyes gaze down at her. He doesn't say anything, doesn't whisper her name or Adam's. His gaze, lit and angry and hungry shift to Adam. The look they exchange is part of a conversation that Blue was never part of. Adam resolute, Ronan playing at hard intimidation then blinks into uncertainty. 

With his hand still in Blue's hair, Ronan leans down and fits his mouth over Adam's, using his extra height and the thrust of his tongue to force Adam's head back. Adam pulls back from the awkward angle, breaking the kiss. 

“What the fuck, Lynch.” There is no real heat in Adam's voice, but something like a warning. 

Ronan stares at him, then leans in again, slower this time. The kiss, wet and soft and insistent, is both a greeting and a brand.

Three is a good number. Persephone always used to say so and this feels so incredibly right that it makes Blue shudder. The promise of what's to come and the tightening between them feels as right as the first time she had met them. Exactly like how the search for Glendower hadn't really started until that night at Nino's and Gansey's epically disastrous attempt to woo her on Adam's behalf. Blue was always meant to be here. Two plus one who became three.

“Fuck, Adam,” Ronan whispers and presses his forehead to Adam's. Blue can feel him, thick and hard pressed against her back. Surprising.

“It's fine, Ronan,” Adam whispers back. “She's family.”

Ronan flinches, and Blue realizes that this is about sharing and need and how to repair a break in the thread of who they are to each other. Adam repairing the leyline, this is the way back to each other. In the absence of Gansey, in the re-ordering of the universe, it was always meant to happen.

Ronan doesn't speak except for a whispered curse when Adam and then Blue lick up the heated length of his rigid cock, exchanging kisses over its wet, red tip. He tries to pull away from them. His face twisted and sharp in the icy glow of moonlight filtering in through the window. 

“No,” he finally says, hand tightening in Blue's hair, tugging her back away from Adam even as her arms twine tightly around Adam's shoulders.

“Ronan,” Blue whispers. “I love him, too.” And because this is not just about Adam, has never been just about Adam, she says, “I love them both.” Because Gansey is the unspoken thing between them. Her smile is a sad, wilted approximation. “You, too.”

His fist still knotted in Blue's hair, Ronan pulls her up close to his face and this time she rises willingly. He stares at her, at the heated distance in her eyes, all want and need and loss.

Adam is silent. He's not a fool and if he listens to the leyline it always whispers to him of meanings and directions. He uncoils one arm from Blue's waist and slides his hand around Ronan's thigh. Squeezes until Ronan looks down at him, then he nods. _Yes, this is how it was always meant to be. Three is a good number._

Ronan exhales and gives a sharp nod, something in his face loosening and softening. He kisses her then. Not the same desperate rush of sex and desire pressed into Adam's kiss, but the sipping of his mouth against hers like welcome home. Blue pulls away from the kiss to press her face into the curve of his neck. Her arms relinquish their grip on Adam to curl around Ronan's shoulders. Ronan kisses her on the temple and holds her while she struggles not to cry.

In the end, they fit like pieces of a puzzle, shift and fold themselves around each other, delicate as a song, balanced as a blade. They seek meaning and answers, give comfort and take it back. The three of them, a pack of wolves without the alpha, without the omega. No beginning and no end, so how can they start and how do they stop. They are lost in the middle, in the formation that Gansey had constructed and then abandoned. 

They come together and redefine the borders of what they are: Adam pressed into Blue, Ronan hunched and curved over Adam. They find the rhythm in the beat of their hearts. The three of them. 

Ronan's eyes, bright and fierce burn into Blue's as he watches her over Adam's shoulder. As she comes, so does he.

They lay coiled against each other in the aftermath, relearning the distances between them. Rediscovering what it means to breathe. Floating in the haze of sweat and sex and love and loss. Contemplating a way to do more than just exist. Living like loving like breathing. Recalibration because even though this feels right, feels like home and there's nowhere else that she'd rather be, it's still a brave new world. Ronan+Adam+Blue is a new equation, one they haven't solved for. But three is a good place to start.

**Author's Note:**

> Summary from Catheyrnne M. Valente's Six-Gun Snow White. Section headers, as follows: The Lover's Dictionary – David Leviathan; Garden – Emelie Sande; 10,000 Miles – Lisa Kershaw; body confessions – Emma Bleker; Palimpset – Catherynne M. Valente; The Lover's Dictionary – David Leviathan; You Are Jeff – Richard Siken
> 
> The Raven Cycle and all related characters belongs to Maggie Stiefvater. This is for fun and not profit. I'm just taking them our for a little questionable excercise.


End file.
